Earlier this year the FAA established a committee including representatives from airlines, planemakers, passengers, pilots, flight attendants and technology firms to look into the case again. It recently concluded that modern aircraft systems can indeed put up with the radio interference that comes from portable electronic devices (or PEDs, as the FAA has them) without compromising safety.

There are some caveats. Individual airlines are obliged to make sure that their planes are “PED-tolerant”, though they are expected to do so by the new year. Mobile-phone calls, mercy be, will still not be allowed. And laptops will have to be stowed away during take-off and landing because they’re considered too heavy to have at large in the cabin. But tablets, e-readers, gaming devices, etc, should be useable.

Some things remain sacrosanct, of course. So flight attendants can look forward to battling harder than ever to get passengers distracted by gadgetry to listen to the safety briefing.

Disqus is probably going to crash with all the retractions and apologies of commenters who took the "sensibly cautious" position that anyone checking the scores during takeoff was endangering the lives of everything in the sky, birds included.

As someone who has been on a plane more than once and who estimates that 90% of people travelling with him have also been on an airplane before, I do not see the point in trying to force people to watch the safety briefings. If you've seen the briefing before then you more or less only need to check where the emergency exit is to be safe in case of an accident. Then again, I have never had anyone come to me and ask me put my newspaper away during the briefing so I would assume that that will continue to be the praxis.

But this is just a case of official policy catching up with reality, isn't it? Or perhaps the ban has still been effective in the US. I fly mostly within Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and I feel that in the last two or three years flight attendants have stopped bothering to enforce the "no electronic devices during take-off or landing" rule.

On Emirates making mobile phone calls during flight is actively encouraged (they make multiple announcements to remind you that it's possible). Officially passengers are not supposed to make calls during take-off or landing, but flight attendants do not challenge passengers who do this.